‘Beauty buried in its own cemetery’: Santiago Rusiñol’s Jardins d’Espanya as reliquaries of aristocratic history

Santiago Rusifñol y Prats (1861–1931) was one of the most significant painter-writers of Catalan Modernismo. He was among the first to write prose poems in Castilian; he spearheaded much of the Catalan Renaixença and Modemismo movements through his organization of the Festes Modemistes and the Quatre Gats artistic group in Sitges and Barcelona; and he introduced into the peninsula French vanguard painting styles and ideologies through his various contacts with Parisian artistic circles. He is best known, however, for his numerous pictorial and poetic descriptions of the royal and public gardens of Spain, a theme to which he dedicated himself almost exclusively only after 1897. From that date onward, he painted garden subjects over and over, in the hundreds, or as one critic lamented, ‘their stagnated beauty being repeated hypnotically until death.’¹.